November 19, 2012

A grab bag of interesting stuff

The inventor of the canning process, Nicholas Appert, was hailed as having “made the seasons stand still.”

He also won a prestigious and very lucrative prize the French military offered in 1795 for a safe way to preserve food that could easily be transported. Napoleon, who famously said "An army marches on its stomach", knew how starvation and sickness could weaken an army. Only a food preservation breakthrough would give him and his troops the needed edge over the Austrian, Dutch, English and Spanish armies

A cluster-balloonist who became the first person to fly the English Channel has launched a house into the sky just like in the Disney movie 'Up'. Intrepid Jonathan Trappe, 38, took off just like the 78-year-old character Carl Frederickson in the hit movie.
Trappe, from Raleigh, North Carolina, stepped into the cartoon themed home before soaring above the Leon International Balloon festival in Mexico yesterday.

He was the first to cross the English Channel with balloons, now he wants to cross the Atlantic in a seven foot lifeboat carried by 365 giant helium balloons.